Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"Engels, Friedrich
Philosophy
Landmarks of Scientific Socialism: "Anti-Duehring"
Engels, Friedrich
Dialectical materialism; Dühring, E. (Eugen), 1833-1921; Economics; Philosophy; Socialism
Here we add that all the historical antitheses of robbers and robbed of
master and subject classes find their explanation in the relatively
undeveloped productivity of human labor. As long as the actual working
people claim that they have no time left at the close of their necessary
labors to attend to the common business of society--the organization of
labor, the business of the government, the administration of justice,
art, science, etc., just so long will distinct classes exist which are
free from actual labor to carry on these functions. Naturally these
classes do not hesitate to lean more and more and more upon the
shoulders of the working class for their own advantage. The development
of the great industry with its enormous increase in the forces of
production for the first time permitted of the subdivision of labor in
all social grades and thus allowed of the reduction of the time
necessary for labor so that enough leisure remains for all to take part
in the actual public business--theoretical as well as practical. So that
now for the first time the dominant and exploiting classes have become
superfluous and even an obstacle to social progress, and so now for the
first time they will be unceremoniously brushed aside in spite of their
"pure force."
When Herr Duehring then shows his scorn of the Greek civilisation
because it was founded on slavery he might just as reasonably reproach
the Greeks for not having steam engines and electric telegraphs. And
when he explains that our modern wage slavery is only a somewhat
transformed and ameliorated inheritance of chattel slavery and not to
be explained from itself (that is from the economic laws of modern
society) it only signifies that wage slavery, like chattel slavery, is
a form of class domination and class subjection as every child knows,
or it is false. So we might with the same right maintain that wage
slavery is only a milder form of cannibalism, the established
original method of disposing of conquered enemies.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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